Category: Perception

You Are Here

Trying to read the map.

Some of the old masters believed the ear outlived the heart, so they would sit with the dead forty days, giving directions. We didn’t expect that kind of treatment, given the times. We thought we had better get to where we knew the map. 

We weren’t sure what to make of the artist’s work, so asked. There is something unknown in you, she said. She wanted us to see it. We asked her if she was sure about that and she laughed, shaking her head. We did not always know how to talk to the artist. 

In one series, she created shapes from mathematical theorems, but we took them for angels. The effect was like walking in a cathedral. We wanted to know how she did it. Something happens, she said. But when I work, I do not think of things.

I wish you could see it, and we asked what. How the void is the place where you stand, she said, and left us. We are still here, looking. 

***

Inspired by the work of Dorothea Rockburne.

What This Is

All but fire, a natural history.

Then came the question of fire, its striking immediacy. It had to do with all that changes suddenly, but we were there to describe what was. A separate matter. It was decided. 

When it came to outlining the real, we would omit this strange incandescence––unnatural, wasn’t it? ––to better focus on the unburning parts.  Research hummed along after that, with machine-like efficiency, without distraction by the looping songs of grieving souls.  

What is this? We would say, of each non-burning specimen. And where there was no name, we could invent one, and all of it fell under a single decision, and it was Progress and we went with it, marching.

Variabilities

Of similar forms.

Considering the history of a given set of bodies, the artist posed a question. Where are the bones of the bones? she asked us, and we knew our nakedness an extension of a larger shadow, casting us out. Once in it, we danced something more than imitation. The camel’s eye our needle, we stitched our skeletons into new visions of before to scatter our tomorrows until we lost their tracks and had to make them new again. 

***

Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.

The Proximity of Matter

With Cynthia Hawkins.

Changing spaces between us, we kept looking. 

Form. Color. Line. Body, body, us.

We were skeptical when you confessed.

My practice is abstraction, you said.

We thought you should not say that out loud.

But you persisted. Draw a tree long enough,

you said, it will evolve. Until what you have

are lines, white space, and the pulse of intersections.

The point was not less tree, but more.

Not the sum of its parts, but something beyond.

In the beginning, you think it’s about figures.

But stay with it, and you see. What matters

is movement. What matters is direction.

What matters is space.

We wondered which space. 

Between the canvas and the eye, you said,

where they float. 

We wondered which they.

***

Inspired by (and using borrowed phrases from) this interview with Cynthia Hawkins. The title comes from one of Hawkins’ series.

Parts and Paintings

Language of forms.

I wanted a language, the artist told us, that felt consistent. 

Let me show you, the artist offered. The bodies. 

And there they were. Body as image, a cipher to be doubled, dismembered, cradled, lifted, evaded––each exceeding the limits of its own banks, overflowing. 

What do you call this one? We asked the artist.

Unfinished, the artist told us. That is why we are here, still looking. 

***

Inspired by the work of Salman Toor.

Subaudible Damage

And resistance.

Behind the veil of official information, a justification for maiming, these blows administered at regular intervals by calculated technique for a purpose, and silence effectively shields it. 

Here is a hearing aid. Take this stethoscope. Hold it to her.  

Listen, wait.  

Keep listening. 

***

Inspired by the work of Sung Tieu.

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